i may not know all the ins and outs of activity monitor, but I only see apps there. Unfortunately I don't know what app is currently using the file... Is there a way to see what files are being used?

I should try and explain more clearly:

there is an incomplete .dmg file i downloaded from poisoned that is now in my trash. When I empty trash, everything empties but that file. When I secure empty the trash, a box pops up saying the file can't be deleted because it is in use.

I can't change the name of the file.

if i select the file while in column view the finder restarts!

I've downloaded every trash script/program on versiontracker and none of them work.

I look in activity monitor and to my sophmore eye there's the usual apps running.

I've had this same problem when I installed Windows Media Player 9. I'm not sure what happened but the application icon itself for WMP9 turned into a document looking icon indicating something had gone wrong. I tried trashing the application itself but got a message saying that some things were still in use. Tried some people's suggestions to going into the terminal to no avail. Simply I left the annoying app on my desktop, restarted in OS 9 from the startup disk and trashed it in OS 9. Hope that helps.

You can also try to log out/in and delete the file. I have found that this works most of the time. If not, just reboot, that will definately kill all processes, and if the file is in the trash, it cannot load...

Don't miss the 'i". It tells rm to prompt before deleting a file so you don't accidentally delete something good.

in the terminal use a backslash to specify special characters. So if you have something like:

(Really *ed up) file name.doc

You can specify:

rm \(Really\ \*ed\ up\)\ file\ name.doc

If you have a directory you can't cd into, wildcards work wonders. The first command can also be written like this:

cd ~/.Trash/tra****/P*

If you're confident you can do this to get rid of everything in the trash:

cd ~/.Trash
sudo rm -rfi *

Should delete everything in your trash.

It it seems to be asking to delete things you don't want deleted hit ctrl-c to stop the process!

[Edit]
P.S. Those stars appear to be automatically masking a naughty word that is in your filename. Use the real filename and not 4 *'s. I am a bit surprised that the forum won't let me use words that contain other strings!

Originally posted by Gymnut Just trash it in 9 if your computer is able to startup in OS9. I've tried removing items from the terminal and the best advice is if you don't know what you're doing in there, it's best left alone.

Originally posted by kaosfere Try using tab completion, and see what that does -- enter as much of the name as you can, then hit tab and it should find the file and fill out the rest of the name the way it wants it to look.

In a directory with just one file in it, you can just hit tab, and it will autofill it. Generally speaking, you need only specify enough of the name to uniquely identify the file.

As for the parens, you can get around problems there by either backslash-escaping them (e.g, do '\(' rather than '(' and '\)' rather than ')'), or by enclosing the entire file name in single-quotes.

Click to expand...

Tab completion is works well until it gets to the actual file I want to delete.

What I did was type ".Trash" and hit TAB which extended the name out to:

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